


Slack Water

by gogollescent



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 07:04:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2683733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short piece for an AU where Lyanna survived the Tower of Joy and came home to Winterfell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slack Water

Catelyn had been uncomfortable with Lyanna’s presence for most of her first year at Winterfell. When he spoke of his abducted sibling, in the fortnight before riding to war, Eddard had made her sound—rather like Petyr, Catelyn thought, not without a pang of horror: like a child whose audacity outweighed it. The Lyanna he brought back from Dorne, however, was listless and brooding, with none of Petyr’s quickness and his bright facade of grace; she hardly spoke, except in outbursts aimed incompletely at her brothers. Catelyn could not see her without thinking of Brandon, and proud Lord Rickard burnt. Lysa wrote letters expressing her fear that _dear Cat_ would find the North a dreary waste; but Winterfell was alive with ghosts, and Lyanna seemed the goriest of them.

Poor woman. All the realm knew how she had lost her babe. _The prince who was promised_ , they called it, in the taverns and the slums—or so Catelyn’s imagination would have had her believe, self-consciously daubing in the hard laughter of veterans. In fact she first had the phrase from Lysa’s mouth. Rumor had traveled north faster than her lord; he was detained by the need to keep Lyanna with him, Lyanna who could not ride. Lyanna who was now Catelyn’s kin as well. So that when Catelyn left Riverrun with Robb a few weeks later, she had in her mind the image of Lyanna's stillborn child: blood-smeared and bluish, with his pose perfect tranquility, like a vale preserved from strong wind. Unconsciously she had imposed on him the features of her dead little brother, Minisa’s ruin. She did not know the things which she remembered.

Juster, then, to say he was promised prince in the speech of high lords. Mocked thusly on the shores of Trident, with sunlight dotting Lysa’s round face, and the noises of the river lending a hollowness to her eager words. “King Robert has another name for it,” she told Catelyn, ripping up grass as if accidentally, and twining it into golden rings. “He says: _Dragonspawn._ ”

Probably that was not then true. Not in the days when Eddard and Lyanna were at Starfall, housed by the Daynes’ eldest daughter though Ice had felled the son. Robert, said Eddard, had ignored all reports of his betrothed’s shame, all urgings to prepare for a Lannister marriage—until Eddard came to him on one knee, and said, she cannot be queen. She will never bear another.

The damage. Catelyn thought of that, too. Not on the ride north, but after she had made the castle, and heard all. Thought of it in silence, stroking Robb’s soft auburn hair. She was ashamed to dwell on the bloody leavings of a young girl’s great pain, but she could not help but wonder, late at night—touching her firm thighs, and the delicate skin of the inward hollow—touching her stretch-marked stomach, mound, stopping barely short of working in a dry hard finger— _and this? If this were destroyed?_

So it should not have surprised her that when Lyanna began to talk again, it was because of Robb. Catelyn had kept her son out of Lyanna’s way for months, afraid that the reminder of past misfortune would unhinge her; but as he became more active, and as Catelyn became engrossed in the duties that came attached to her title, it grew harder to guarantee that Old Nan would show the same care. In fact, Catelyn later suspected that the woman had arranged the encounter deliberately.

Whatever the truth, Catelyn went looking for Robb one day only to be told he had been taken to the godswood. She left the nursery at a half-run, forgetting her resolution to show Winterfell’s people strength and dignity; she arrived at the heart tree panting, tangled up in her skirts, her hair a glinting cloud over hot forehead and mouth.

"I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so—discomposed," said a voice under white branches.

Catelyn almost didn’t recognize it. She had seen enough of Lyanna to be haunted by the dark grey eyes—so much harder and more polished-seeming than Eddard’s distant gaze—eyes which in dreams sometimes stared out of Minisa’s face, or Lysa’s; but the voice was one she had only heard raised, muffled, behind stone walls, or pared to gruesome monosyllables. Now it sounded surprised. Coarsely gleeful, but kindly, too, and somehow older than she could have foreseen.

Perhaps the edge in it was just from a want of use. “Lyanna,” Catelyn said, breathless but mastering herself, feeling the eyes of the weirwood on her throat. “And—” Yes, there was Robb, peeking out from behind Lyanna’s pale skirt. Someone should have made her new gowns, Catelyn thought, stricken; Lyanna had perhaps not asked, and of course it would not have occurred to Benjen, or even Eddard, good as he was to his remaining family wherever he knew how to be. But to leave her in the milk-white velvet of her childhood, like a virgin—though of course white was a Stark color. And Lyanna would never now marry away from her house. _I am not in the fortress of my childhood._ Here, no maid’s maturity was heralded with blood colors, vein blue and muddy red; winter was coming, and white would once again cover the earth.

Still; Lyanna had been fourteen when Rhaegar took her away. The pearl-stitched bodice showed strain across the shoulders. I _could fix that_ , Catelyn thought.

"Hello, sweetness," she said aloud to Robb, holding out her hands. Robb toddled toward her, though he trailed sticky fingers across the side of Lyanna’s dress, as though reluctant to go from shelter to shelter without a rampart between. Lyanna smiled down at him, but briskly. Not at all a look of wistful avarice. Catelyn felt hope rise in her heart.

The other woman’s words of greeting came back to her then. She smoothed back her hair, picked Robb up, and said, “Am I _re_ composed?” And immediately after: “Do you see me so very often, Lady Lyanna?”

"All right," said Lyanna, ruefully. "I take your point. You’re saying, I suppose, that you run around half-naked when I’m up in my tower?"

Catelyn gave a short laugh. "That's—very funny."

She pressed down on an absurd impulse to chide Lyanna for poor taste, though a moment ago she had invited the jest. Unfair, she said to herself. Unjust. But something else was rising behind sudden irritation: a salt tide of rumors, whispers, stories from the mouths of broken men—the knowledge that here was the woman they had started the war for, so little and so wan. There were unkind thoughts that she had easily frozen over as long as Lyanna was grieving; but now—now that she was at risk of finding the other girl pleasant and agreeable!—they came rushing back as though unlocked by the heat of the new-risen sun.

What, then? She would not punish the ghost for gaining flesh. She thought very briefly of Lysa, on the bank, falling silent when her burden of knowledge had been delivered; silent, looking at Catelyn’s still-round belly, and the bundle in her arms. The expression on her face: like the Crone herself watching men squander summer. Though Lyanna, twice bereaved, had grinned to see Robb go.

"I don’t think, if I went about anything-naked, your brother’s heart would bear the strain—" But Catelyn's smile was fading, and Lyanna would see it; she put Robb down again, and stumbled forward, to sit beside the spring. Steam rising from the onyx pool cupped her open eyes like a hand. "Oh, Father," she said, "oh, Mother," while the weirwood rustled in apparent disapproval of the southron blasphemy. Lyanna hurried to her side, saying as it seemed from some distance, what is it? Catelyn, are you well?

Like Petyr, she thought. Petyr, too, had always been quick to unearth her griefs.

"Not your fault," said Catelyn, blankly, passing a true hand over her face, and covering Lyanna’s fingers on her shoulder. "Not your fault. You must spend time with Robb whenever you wish. He should know his aunt—but no, nothing to do with you. To think," she said, giving into sudden pain, and resting her face on Lyanna’s arm; "all this time, and I have been a bad sister." She breathed, and Lyanna held her like a son.


End file.
